This web site is to help with one part, the diet for avoiding migraine food triggers, of Dr Buchholz’s comprehensive migraine prevention plan in “Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3 Program for Taking Charge of Your Pain.” To use the information on this web site, please read the book. It includes the whole picture: migraine physiology and diagnosis, treatment and prevention including medications, and short stories of patient experiences, maybe some like your own.

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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Migraine-free Living?

Eating on a restricted diet requires planning, effort, and
time.So it’s a tricky part of the “Heal
your Headache” plan.Thus, this website,
but perhaps the name doesn’t reflect that other changes are helpful, too.The diet element is for reducing triggers
that we have control over.

Another trigger reduction piece can be learning to reduce
stress when possible and continually improving how we deal with stress.Life gives plenty of opportunities to work on
this.For me, techniques involve prioritizing
and realizing what I don’t need to do,
limiting the number of activities me and the kids are committed to at any one
time, making time for us and for me, delegating to others, meditating (in the
form of playing the guitar), getting outdoors and appreciating nature, and
running.Deciding to accept that I’m
going to follow the diet, not doubting or worrying over it, reduces stress for
me, too.I’ve decided I’m going to cook,
so the rest of the decisions are about how I’m going to go about it.I do eat out sometimes, too, a topic for
another blog.

Aerobic activity you enjoy or convince yourself to enjoy in
addition to reducing stress is also a way to increase the trigger
threshold.I do best running about 2-3
mi a day.More than that tends to be a
trigger for me.The distance is
something I can do over a 1 hr lunch break, so it’s manageable.Even if I can’t get in 20-30 min of running,
I try to get in a mile or go hiking, anything. Something is better than nothing, but I also don’t
stress when I don’t have the opportunity to get it in, satisfied knowing that I’m
doing what I can.

So, there is reducing triggers with lifestyle changes,
increasing thresholds with lifestyle changes, and another part of the HYH (“Heal
your Headache”) plan, the use of medications.Buchholz’s book dedicates a few chapters to the different pieces of this,
covering use of medications for both increasing trigger threshold (preventive
meds) and for treating migraine attacks, as well as how medications we take for
other conditions can affect migraines.I’ve
been able to come off of all preventive meds (which also reduces stress because
I don’t have to worry about forgetting to take pills or stress because I don’t
have them with me).To treat mild migraines,
I use ibuprofen, though never could before putting myself on the HYH plan.To treat more severe ones, which still come
occasionally, I use imitrex.I found
that it is often better if I can wait until before going to bed to take the
imitrex, because sometimes it drains me, leaves me with no energy.I have taken it without waiting and been ok
sometimes, too.Seems to be a matter of
knowing what my body can handle when.I
get better at it over time.Buchholz’s
book has been a valuable tool.

Whether the name is changed or not, there is more to
consider than diet.And being
migraine-free is not necessarily the goal.Once I adjusted my expectations to control migraines rather than eliminate
them, I was able to see how far I had come as something to be content with, as
a success.

2 comments:

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